How to Get a Featured Snippet on Google Search Result

Google search shows up a featured snippet is a summary of an answer to a query on top of the search results with text content from a webpage. As it is automatically selected by Google, peoples all over the earth discovered various tricks to get a featured snippet on Google search result from own domain. The domain under question must be an older active website with a decent MOZ rank (probably over 50 does the job nicely). The reasons to run to get a featured snippet are obvious – the position of the featured snippets give the content a new “position zero” and tend the n00b readers to click it. Google search tends to pull them from the URLs which are already ranking on page one, but it can also pull from lower-ranking URLs. A kind of “theft method” is finding a triggering phrase related to your website. An example key phrase can be “big data advantages” for our website. The particular key phrase gives “big data advantages” extracting data from that particular website with URL and image. By studying the backlink, social sharing you can “steal” the format of a low MOZ rank website’s article (never verbatim copy) and SEO optimize it. We will suggest limiting such work only to few attempts. Knowing some basic things can increase the chance of getting a featured snippet from your website. Your website must have some authority on the niche to get the snippet. It is practical to read Google’s short answer about the featured snippets.

Use the correct keywords

Google search tries to show up a “featured snippet” to a non-expert. If you search with “analogue sensor”, you’ll notice that Google shows up a featured snippet and also shows some Q& A as “People also ask”. Each of these Q& A are also from a different website and usually, the URLs are also sources of featured snippets to slight different key phrases on the same topic. Use the perfect tools to start searching for keywords to target that could be ideal for your site. If your website is about DIY or health, or finance, the chance of getting featured snippets is higher than compared to the other niche. Article title with certain phrases such as a recipe, best, Vs., make, definition etc increases the chance of getting the thing. Article titles bearing the five Ws (who, what, when, when, where) start basic questions whose answers are which are considered a good topic for the blogs.

Use the correct tools

That is a costly matter today outside Google Trends, Google Keyword planner like free tools. You can use the questions asked in the Q& A sites as hints of what people ask. There is a website named Answer the public which is extremely helpful for the content creators. Their free version is for delivering a clear-cut idea of the actual service. Serpstat and SEMrush are (mostly) paid tools for keyword research. Both of these tools show up “rich snippet”.

Format and on-page SEO

The format and quality of content probably most important. Format, title, sub-title, lists and graphics of the article are the key factors around increasing the probability. They are a bigger part of today’s SEO. A too slow loading website unlikely to get into rich snippets. There are three types of snippets :

• Paragraph
• List
• Table

Give importance of graphics

From our experience, using appealing photo/graphics in the content will eliminate the chance to get the URL in the featured snippet. For a technology niche, using article relevant custom graphics/illustration increases some chance of automated selection by Google’s system. In other words, the methods you use for Pinterest should work for featured snippets as well. Avoid photos, graphics which violate the copyright. Using proper alt tag is a basic key to image optimization.

Of course, you can embed video, audio in your blog post to deliver a richer experience to the readers. These days, there are a lot of free and paid video editors. You should select the video editor which can be used to deliver video content matched with the theme of your website.

Related meta-tags

There are some new meta-tags, such as max-snippet. They are not mandatory to add to get a featured snippet. You can read later from different resources how to use those in this way for more control :

The above example gives an idea of using 50 words for a paragraph targeted to be a featured snippet.

Conclusion

There is no warranted way or tool to get a featured snippet. But the tips and free tools we pointed should work with good quality content with fewer competitors.